“I’ll go with you,” said Larry.
The moon was higher now. As they approached, it lit the bay up like a mirror. Away from the music, Mitchell could hear the wild dogs barking in the jungle. He led Larry straight down to the water’s edge. Then, without pausing, he let his lungi drop and stepped out of it. He waded into the sea.
“Skinny-dip?”
Mitchell didn’t answer.
“What’s the water temp?”
“Cold,” said Mitchell, though this wasn’t true: the water was warm. It was just that he wanted to be alone in it. He waded out until the water was waist deep. Cupping both hands, he sprinkled water over his face. Then he dropped into the water and began to float on his back.
His ears plugged up. He heard water rushing, then the silence of the sea, then the ringing again. It was clearer than ever. It wasn’t a ringing so much as a beacon penetrating his body.
He lifted his head and said, “Larry.”
“What?”
“Thanks for taking care of me.”
“No problem.”
Now that he was in the water, he felt better again. He sensed the pull of the tide out in the bay, retreating with the night wind and the rising moon. A small hot stream came out of him, and he paddled away from it and continued to float. He stared up at the sky. He didn’t have his pen or aerograms with him, so he began to dictate silently: Dear Mom and Dad, The earth itself is all the evidence we need. Its rhythms, its perpetual regeneration, the rising and falling of the moon, the tide flowing in to land and out again to the sea, all this is a lesson for that very slow learner, the human race. The earth keeps repeating the drill, over and over, until we get it right.
“Nobody would believe this place,” Larry said on the beach. “It’s a total fucking paradise.”
The ringing grew louder. A minute passed, or a few minutes. Finally he heard Larry say, “Hey, Mitch, I’m going back to the party now. You OK?” He sounded far away.
Mitchell stretched out his arms, which allowed him to float a little higher in the water. He couldn’t tell if Larry had gone or not. He was looking at the moon. He’d begun to notice something about the moon that he’d never noticed before. He could make out the wavelengths of the moonlight. He’d managed to slow his mind down enough to perceive that. The moonlight would speed up a second, growing brighter, then it would slow down, becoming dim. It pulsed. The moonlight was a kind of ringing itself. He lay undulating in the warm water, observing the correspondence of moonlight and ringing, how they increased together, diminished together. After a while, he began to be aware that he, too, was like that. His blood pulsed with the moonlight, with the ringing. Something was coming out of him, far away. He felt his insides emptying out. The sensation of water leaving him was no longer painful or explosive; it had become a steady flow of his essence into nature. In the next second, Mitchell felt as though he were dropping through the water, and then he had no sense of himself at all. He wasn’t the one looking at the moon or hearing the ringing. And yet he was aware of them. For a moment, he thought he should send word to his parents, to tell them not to worry. He’d found the paradise beyond the island. He was trying to gather himself to dictate this last message, but soon he realized that there was nothing left of him to do it—nothing at all—no person left to hold a pen or to send word to the people he loved, who would never understand.
1996
BASTER
The recipe came in the mail:
Mix semen of three men.
Stir vigorously.
Fill turkey baster.
Recline.
Insert nozzle.
Squeeze.
INGREDIENTS:
1 pinch Stu Wadsworth
1 pinch Jim Freeson
1 pinch Wally Mars
There was no return address but Tomasina knew who had sent it: Diane, her best friend and, recently, fertility specialist. Ever since Tomasina’s latest catastrophic breakup, Diane had been promoting what they referred to as Plan B. Plan A they’d been working on for some time. It involved love and a wedding. They’d been working on Plan A for a good eight years. But in the final analysis—and this was Diane’s whole point—Plan A had proved much too idealistic. So now they were giving Plan B a look.
Plan B was more devious and inspired, less romantic, more solitary, sadder, but braver, too. It stipulated borrowing a man with decent teeth, body, and brains, free of the major diseases, who was willing to heat himself up with private fantasies (they didn’t have to include Tomasina) in order to bring off the tiny sputter that was indispensable to the grand achievement of having a baby. Like twin Schwarzkopfs, the two friends noted how the battlefield had changed of late: the reduction in their artillery (they’d both just turned forty); the increasing guerrilla tactics of the enemy (men didn’t even come out into the open anymore); and the complete dissolution of the code of honor. The last man who’d got Tomasina pregnant—not the boutique investment banker, the one before him, the Alexander Technique instructor—hadn’t even gone through the motions of proposing marriage. His idea of honor had been to split the cost of the abortion. There was no sense denying it: the finest soldiers had quit the field, joining the peace of marriage. What was left was a ragtag gang of adulterers and losers, hit-and-run types, village-burners. Tomasina had to give up the idea of meeting someone she could spend her life with. Instead, she had to give birth to someone who would spend life with her.
But it wasn’t until she received the recipe that Tomasina realized she was desperate enough to go ahead. She knew it before she’d even stopped laughing. She knew it when she found herself thinking, Stu Wadsworth I could maybe see. But Wally Mars?
* * *
Tomasina—I repeat, like a ticking clock—was forty. She had pretty much everything she wanted in life. She had a great job as an assistant producer of CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. She had a terrific, adult-size apartment on Hudson Street. She had good looks, mostly intact. Her breasts weren’t untouched by time, but they were holding their own. And she had new teeth. She had a set of gleaming new bonded teeth. They’d whistled at first, before she got used to them, but now they were fine. She had biceps. She had an IRA kicked up to $175,000. But she didn’t have a baby. Not having a husband she could take. Not having a husband was, in some respects, preferable. But she wanted a baby.
“After thirty-five,” the magazine said, “a woman begins to have trouble conceiving.” Tomasina couldn’t believe it. Just when she’d got her head on straight, her body started falling apart. Nature didn’t give a damn about her maturity level. Nature wanted her to marry her college boyfriend. In fact, from a purely reproductive standpoint, nature would have preferred that she marry her high school boyfriend. While Tomasina had been going about her life, she hadn’t noticed it: the eggs pitching themselves into oblivion, month by month. She saw it all now. While she canvassed for RIPIRG in college, her uterine walls had been thinning. While she got her journalism degree, her ovaries had cut estrogen production. And while she slept with as many men as she wanted, her fallopian tubes had begun to narrow, to clog. During her twenties. That extended period of American childhood. The time when, educated and employed, she could finally have some fun. Tomasina once had five orgasms with a cabdriver named Ignacio Veranes while parked on Gansevoort Street. He had a bent, European-style penis and smelled like machine oil. Tomasina was twenty-five at the time. She wouldn’t do it again, but she was glad she’d done it then. So as not to have regrets. But in eliminating some regrets you create others. She’d only been in her twenties. She’d been playing around was all. But the twenties become the thirties, and a few failed relationships put you at thirty-five, when one day you pick up Mirabella and read, “After thirty-five, a woman’s fertility begins to decrease. With each year, the proportion of miscarriages and birth defects rises.”
It had risen for five years now. Tomasina was forty years, one month, and fourteen days old. And panicked, and sometimes not panicked. Sometimes perfectly cal
m and accepting about the whole thing.
She thought about them, the little children she never had. They were lined at the windows of a ghostly school bus, faces pressed against the glass, huge-eyed, moist-lashed. They looked out, calling, “We understand. It wasn’t the right time. We understand. We do.”
The bus shuddered away, and she saw the driver. He raised one bony hand to the gearshift, turning to Tomasina as his face split open in a smile.
The magazine also said that miscarriages happened all the time, without a woman’s even noticing. Tiny blastulas scraped against the womb’s walls and, finding no purchase, hurtled downward through the plumbing, human and otherwise. Maybe they stayed alive in the toilet bowl for a few seconds, like goldfish. She didn’t know. But with three abortions, one official miscarriage, and who knows how many unofficial ones, Tomasina’s school bus was full. When she awoke at night, she saw it slowly pulling away from the curb, and she heard the noise of the children packed in their seats, that cry of children indistinguishable between laughter and scream.
* * *
Everyone knows that men objectify women. But none of our sizing up of breasts and legs can compare with the cold-blooded calculation of a woman in the market for semen. Tomasina was a little taken aback by it herself, and yet she couldn’t help it: once she made her decision, she began to see men as walking spermatozoa. At parties, over glasses of Barolo (soon to be giving it up, she drank like a fish), Tomasina examined the specimens who came out of the kitchen, or loitered in the hallways, or held forth from the armchairs. And sometimes, her eyes misting, she felt that she could discern the quality of each man’s genetic material. Some semen auras glowed with charity; others were torn with enticing holes of savagery; still others flickered and dimmed with substandard voltage. Tomasina could ascertain health by a guy’s smell or complexion. Once, to amuse Diane, she’d ordered every male party guest to stick out his tongue. The men had obliged, asking no questions. Men always oblige. Men like being objectified. They thought that their tongues were being inspected for nimbleness, toward the prospect of oral abilities. “Open up and say ah,” Tomasina kept commanding, all night long. And the tongues unfurled for display. Some had yellow spots or irritated taste buds, others were blue as spoiled beef. Some performed lewd acrobatics, flicking up and down or curling upward to reveal spikes depending from their undersides like the armor of deep-sea fish. And then there were two or three that looked perfect, opalescent as oysters and enticingly plump. These were the tongues of the married men, who’d already donated their semen—in abundance—to the lucky women taxing the sofa cushions across the room. The wives and mothers who were nursing other complaints by now, of insufficient sleep and stalled careers—complaints that to Tomasina were desperate wishes.
* * *
At this point, I should introduce myself. I’m Wally Mars. I’m an old friend of Tomasina’s. Actually, I’m an old boyfriend. We went out for three months and seven days in the spring of 1985. At the time, most of Tomasina’s friends were surprised that she was dating me. They said what she did when she saw my name on the ingredient list. They said, “Wally Mars?” I was considered too short (I’m only five feet four), and not athletic enough. Tomasina loved me, though. She was crazy about me for a while. Some dark hook in our brains, which no one could see, linked us up. She used to sit across the table, tapping it and saying, “What else?” She liked to hear me talk.
She still did. Every few weeks she called to invite me to lunch. And I always went. At the time all this happened, we made a date for a Friday. When I got to the restaurant, Tomasina was already there. I stood behind the hostess station for a moment, looking at her from a distance and getting ready. She was lounging back in her chair, sucking the life out of the first of the three cigarettes she allowed herself at lunch. Above her head, on a ledge, an enormous flower arrangement exploded into bloom. Have you noticed? Flowers have gone multicultural, too. Not a single rose, tulip, or daffodil lifted its head from the vase. Instead, jungle flora erupted: Amazonian orchids, Sumatran flytraps. The jaws of one flytrap trembled, stimulated by Tomasina’s perfume. Her hair was thrown back over her bare shoulders. She wasn’t wearing a top—no, she was. It was flesh-colored and skintight. Tomasina doesn’t exactly dress corporate, unless you could call a brothel a kind of corporation. What she has to display was on display. (It was on display every morning for Dan Rather, who had a variety of nicknames for Tomasina, all relating to Tabasco sauce.) Somehow, though, Tomasina got away with her chorus-girl outfits. She toned them down with her maternal attributes: her homemade lasagna, her hugs and kisses, her cold remedies.
At the table, I received both a hug and a kiss. “Hi, hon!” she said, and pressed herself against me. Her face was all lit up. Her left ear, inches from my cheek, was a flaming pink. I could feel its heat. She pulled away and we looked at each other.
“So,” I said. “Big news.”
“I’m going to do it, Wally. I’m going to have a baby.”
We sat down. Tomasina took a drag on her cigarette, then funneled her lips to the side, expelling smoke.
“I just figured, Fuck it,” she said. “I’m forty. I’m an adult. I can do this.” I wasn’t used to her new teeth. Every time she opened her mouth it was like a flashbulb going off. They looked good, though, her new teeth. “I don’t care what people think. People either get it or they don’t. I’m not going to raise it all by myself: my sister’s going to help. And Diane. You can babysit, too, Wally, if you want.”
“Me?”
“You can be an uncle.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.
“I hear you’ve got a list of candidates on a recipe,” I said.
“What?”
“Diane told me she sent you a recipe.”
“Oh, that.” She inhaled. Her cheeks hollowed out.
“And I was on it or something?”
“Old boyfriends.” Tomasina exhaled upward. “All my old boyfriends.”
Just then the waiter arrived to take our drink order.
Tomasina was still gazing up at her spreading smoke. “Martini up very dry two olives,” she said. Then she looked at the waiter. She kept looking. “It’s Friday,” she explained. She ran her hand through her hair, flipping it back. The waiter smiled.
“I’ll have a martini, too,” I said. The waiter turned and looked at me. His eyebrows rose and then he turned back to Tomasina. He smiled again and went off.
As soon as he was gone, Tomasina leaned across the table to whisper in my ear. I leaned, too. Our foreheads touched. And then she said, “What about him?”
“Who?”
“Him.”
She indicated with her head. Across the restaurant, the waiter’s tensed buns retreated, dipping and weaving.
“He’s a waiter.”
“I’m not going to marry him, Wally. I just want his sperm.”
“Maybe he’ll bring some out as a side dish.”
Tomasina sat back, stubbing out her cigarette. She pondered me from a distance, then reached for cigarette number two. “Are you going to get all hostile again?”
“I’m not being hostile.”
“Yes, you are. You were hostile when I told you about this and you’re acting hostile now.”
“I just don’t know why you want to pick the waiter.”
She shrugged. “He’s cute.”
“You can do better.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. A lot of places.” I picked up my soup spoon. I saw my face in it, tiny and distorted. “Go to a sperm bank. Get a Nobel Prize winner.”
“I don’t just want smart. Brains aren’t everything.” Tomasina squinted, sucking in smoke, then looked off dreamily. “I want the whole package.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. I picked up my menu. I read the words Fricassée de Lapereau nine times. What was bothering me was this: the state of nature. It was becoming clear to me—clearer than ever—what my status was in the stat
e of nature: it was low. It was somewhere around hyena. This wasn’t the case, as far as I knew, back in civilization. I’m a catch, pragmatically speaking. I make a lot of money, for one thing. My IRA is pumped up to $254,000. But money doesn’t count, apparently, in the selection of semen. The waiter’s tight buns counted for more.
“You’re against the idea, aren’t you?” Tomasina said.
“I’m not against it. I just think, if you’re going to have a baby, it’s best if you do it with somebody else. Who you’re in love with.” I looked up at her. “And who loves you.”
“That’d be great. But it’s not happening.”
“How do you know?” I said. “You might fall in love with somebody tomorrow. You might fall in love with somebody six months from now.” I looked away, scratching my cheek. “Maybe you’ve already met the love of your life and don’t even know it.” Then I looked back into her eyes. “And then you realize it. And it’s too late. There you are. With some stranger’s baby.”
Tomasina was shaking her head. “I’m forty, Wally. I don’t have much time.”
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